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“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,

and to God the things that are God’s”1

Christianity is not a culture-religion. By that I mean that Christianity is not a religion so inextricably bound up with the history, art, lifestyle, and shared values (culture) of a particular people that it is virtually inseparable from these, and therefore accessible to other cultures only as a total package—e.g., Christianity plus Western culture.2 I propose that this should be first in our reflections on what Christianity is not, because in this Euro-American context of ours there is a very strong temptation to merge Christianity and our way of life, our culture. All around us there are Christian groupings and Christian voices that regard Christianity as being virtually inseparable from the mores, pursuits, and values that we have come to associate with America. Many of these same voices herald America as the great beacon of Christianity in a dangerously diverse and darkening world. Even those of us who try to convey a more nuanced view of the relation between Christianity and our particular culture are tempted often to gauge the course of Christianity in the world by its status within own society, to the point of our being—in our churches—constantly at work amassing statistics and number crunching.

This tendency of North American Christians to meld Christianity and our culture is not new. Sidney Mead, who was widely regarded as the dean of American church historians, wrote of the Americanization of Christianity—especially Protestantism. He maintained that from the middle of the nineteenth century the practice of using the terms Protestantism and Americanism almost synonymously became very common.3 In some circles, one might argue, this practice is still more pronounced today, or at least it is pursued more aggressively. For with the advent of widespread multiculturalism and religious pluralism, as well as our society’s post-9/11 apprehension of militant Islam, the mindset that finds an indelible association between the Christian religion and America has become increasingly insistent and defensive. A narrative has emerged in which the actual variety of religious influences that characterized America’s beginnings, including not only Unitarianism and Deism but also secular humanism, tends to be forgotten, and is replaced by an ultra-evangelicalism and biblicism that would hardly have been applauded by Jefferson, Franklin, John A. MacDonald (the first prime minister of Canada), and other architects of this society.

Now, obviously enough, Christianity can never be extricated entirely from its social and historical matrix; and undoubtedly it will happen that the more quantitatively successful and politically influential a religion becomes, the more transparently will its host society reflect that religion, or at least its more prominent public aspects. But even in a highly Christianized society—hypothetically, even in a monolithically Christian society—should it not remain possible for thoughtful Christians to distinguish between their faith and its cultural environs, its social wrappings? Ancient Israel could and often did boast that it was unshakably loyal to the monotheistic principles of the Mosaic faith: “We have Abraham as our father,” cried John the Baptist’s Pharisaic and other critics (e.g., Luke 3:8). But this claim prevented neither the Baptist nor Jesus nor the prophets before them from engaging in a relentless and often brutally critical denunciation of Israel’s presumption and virtual apostasy. It is in fact this ancient paradigm of the distinction between religion and prophetic faith on which I shall draw for the main substance of this chapter and, indeed, this study as a whole.

But first we must pause long enough to pay attention to a point—a biblical point much neglected today—even more radical than the insistence that Christianity is not a culture-religion. And that is that Christianity is not a religion, period.

Not a Religion!

If we take the Bible to be the primary witness to the heart and core of this faith (and in the tradition of classical Protestantism that is certainly what we should do), we must realize that this collection of writings, accumulated over a period of a thousand years, contains an extraordinarily consistent and often intense quarrel with religion. The prophets of the older Testament waged a continuing struggle against religion, both outside and (even more vehemently) inside their own religious community.

I hate, I despise your festivals

and I take no delight in your solemn assemblies . . .

Take away from me the noise of your songs;

I will not listen to the melody of your harps.

But let justice role down like waters . . . (Amos 5:21–22, RSV)

The bitterest opponents of Jesus, and the ones he himself frequently singled out for censor, were those regarded by his society as being the most religious of all. Jesus’s quarrel with the scribes and Pharisees has nothing to do with their being Jewish—that is a vicious fiction of later interpreters, perhaps already beginning with certain strains in the New Testament itself. Jesus himself was Jewish (Christians cannot say that too often!). His criticism of these superreligious ones (criticism strictly in line with the whole prophetic tradition of Israel) rather is at base a criticism of the characteristic tendencies of religion as such, especially when it has hardened into dogma and ritual and moral codes and is made the acid test of human worth and belonging.

“The message of the Bible,” the young Karl Barth was moved to say (because, as minister in a Swiss village that loved to think itself impeccably religious, he knew all about Protestant smugness!) “is that God hates religion.” What we must say about religion, Barth writes, is “that it is the one great concern of godless man.”4 Barth included in his voluminous Church Dogmatics a whole section (about thirty long pages of small print!) titled “Religion as Unbelief”5—a piece of theological reflection comparable to Kierkegaard’s Attack upon Christendom. Religion, Barth wrote—

is a grasping . . . [M]an [sic!] tries to grasp at truth [by] himself . . . But in that case he does not do what he has to do when the truth comes to him. He does not believe. If he did, he would listen; but in religion he talks. If he did, he would accept a gift; but in religion he takes something for himself. If he did, he would let God Himself intercede for God; but in religion he ventures to grasp at God.6

Paul Tillich, though he often disagreed with Barth, was very close to the Swiss theologian in this warning about the wiles of religion. In a sermon titled “The Yoke of Religion,” based on the Scripture text, “Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden . . . take my yoke upon you,” (Matthew 11:28, KJV), Tillich argues that the burden Jesus wants to take from us is “the burden of religion.” He continues:

We are all permanently in danger of abusing Jesus by stating that He is the founder of a new religion, and the bringer of another, more refined, and more enslaving law. And so we see in all Christian Churches the toiling and labouring of people who are called Christians, serious Christians, under innumerable laws which they cannot fulfill, from which they flee, to which they return, or which they replace by other laws. This is the yoke from which Jesus wants to liberate us. He is more than a priest or a prophet or a religious genius. These all subject us to religion. He frees us from religion. They make new religious laws; He overcomes the religious law . . .

We call Jesus the Christ not because He brought a new religion, but because He is the end of religion, above religion and irreligion, above Christianity and non-Christianity. We spread his call because it is the call to every [person] in every period to receive the New Being, that hidden saving power in our existence, which takes from us labor and burden, and gives rest to our souls.7

It is true that Tillich, elsewhere, is able to use the term religion in a more neutral or sometimes even a positive way, namely, as human striving for meaning and deliverance to which the revelation in Christ comes as answer. But the answer—the gospel or (as he more often calls it) “the Christian message”—is at the same time an answer to the quest of religion and a critique of that quest. Like Barth and most others belonging to the great renewal of Protestant theology in the first half of the twentieth century that is called (not very instructively) neo-orthodoxy,8 Tillich finds religion at best ambiguous and at worst (as in this sermon) a terrible “burden” under which humankind labors.

Indeed, this kind of distinction between faith and religion became one of twentieth-century Protestantism’s most important insights. One wonders today, when in our many university departments of religion we have so much to say on the subject, whatever happened to this critique of the whole phenomenon! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was another who frequently drew upon this critique and the need to differentiate religion from faith. Bonhoeffer acknowledged that Karl Barth was “the first theologian to begin the criticism of religion—and that [he said] remains his really great merit.”9 Religion, Bonhoeffer believed, is not at all what Christianity at its kerygmatic core is about. “Jesus,” he writes, “does not call [people] to a new religion, but to life.”10 Following an exegetical tradition dating back to the early church, he contrasts the account of Pentecost in the second chapter of Acts with the myth of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11. Babel is the Bible’s most dramatic symbolic depiction of the religious impulse—the impulse, as Barth called it, of “grasping” after the ultimate, the struggle for possession and securitas. In that myth, it will be remembered, human beings, terrified by the precariousness of their creaturehood (well, human creaturehood is precarious; the Bible does not make light of that!), reach up after divine transcendence in a pathetic yet futile effort to secure the future. Their absurd tower—the prototype of many towers!—is an attempt, as it were, to get hold of and control the Controller. What they get instead is a still greater consciousness of their finitude and vulnerability: intent upon possessing divinity, they end in an even greater failure of humanity. Their communality is destroyed, and they cannot communicate with one another any longer. By contrast, Bonhoeffer saw, Pentecost, the beginnings of the Christian movement, does not depict human beings grasping after the Absolute but the reverse: it depicts the Spirit of God grasping and transforming human beings. Babel, the religious quest, ends in greater human alienation; Pentecost, the birth of faith, effects reconciliation among those, even, who cannot fully understand one another.11

Why, we may ask, is it important for us today to revisit and reclaim this neo-orthodox critique of religion—not just of culture-religion, but of religion as such? In the first place, I would say, we should do so because the critique is not just a twentieth-century theological invention but a courageous attempt to recover a genuine and unavoidable biblical theme—a biblical theme marginalized and lost sight of, for the most part, as soon as the Christian religion took upon itself the role of religious establishment. A religion that wants to incorporate and commend itself to everyone cannot afford to be self-critical. It must be promotional, upbeat, positive! During the Christendom ages, whenever biblical texts arose critical of religion, such as those famous lines of Amos about God’s hatred of cultic worship, it could be (and was) explained that such denunciations applied not to the church but to the synagogue—that is, to the failed parental faith that Christianity was destined to displace and replace! The critique of religion is genuine, however, only when the community of faith knows that this critique applies to itself—that this is part of “the judgment [that] begins with the household of God” (1 Peter 4:17).

But there is an even more important reason why this biblical and neo-orthodox critique of religion needs to be studied and reflected upon today, as part of our attempt, as Christians, to discover a way of living responsibly in the midst of a religiously pluralistic civilization. If and insofar as religion is inherently a kind of grasping, as Barth insisted, it follows that the religious impulse will also be inherently competitive and conflictual. A spiritual struggle motivated by the desire for permanence, certitude, and the possession of ultimate power and verity is not likely to manifest much openness to other claims to truth. To the contrary, it will in all likelihood manifest the kind of exclusiveness that guards its spiritual treasures zealously, and, having as it thinks wrested them from eternity, claims sole ownership of them. Its attitude will be some version of a pronouncement I heard recently from a true-believing Christian reflecting upon Islam: “If I’m right, they’re wrong.” But who can say “I’m right” with that kind of unwavering certitude? Who, coram Deo—standing in the presence of the living God—can attribute such finality to his or her own religious claims?

In introducing this study, I suggested that in all religions there are vulnerable spots—ideas, attitudes, or emphases that under certain sociohistorical conditions are bound to become flash points of conflict. But what we must conclude on the basis of the above analysis is that, at bottom, it is religion itself and as such that constitutes the greatest and most permanent point of friction. Since it concerns that which a community regards as ultimate, the religion of one culture is bound to look upon the religions of other cultures with suspicion and mistrust. In a global village where religious disputation no longer limits itself to quarrels within Christendom but spills over increasingly into the unprecedented meeting of world religions, all of them made newly insecure by their new proximity to and consciousness of one another, the greatest flash point of all is inseparable from the religious impulse as such; with its grasping after security, its scramble for the absolute, and its incapacity for self-doubt and dialogue with others, religion in the global village seems destined for a history of violence. The newly popular atheism of today understands this and capitalizes on it. It argues, with a kind of dogged logic, that the only way humankind can avoid the great catastrophes to which this situation points is by dispensing altogether with “the God delusion.” But Christians are called to embrace a greater realism than that! No one—and certainly not a bevy of smugly atheistic intellectuals—is going to rid homo sapiens of the religious impulse. Contrary to Bonhoeffer’s late musings about the disappearance of homo religiosus,12 it seems likely that human beings will continue to build their towers of Babel, world without end. Sometimes, perhaps especially in times of great insecurity, the religious quest will be dominant; at other times it will be weak or even peripheral. Sometimes it will be religious in the traditional sense; at other times it will be some secular ideology dressed up in what are essentially religious pretentions to finality. But Christians who consider the biblical critique of religion and the role of the Christ in relation to it will be able at least to maintain a critical perspective on religion—especially their own Christian religion! They will be delivered a little, as Tillich says, from the “burden” of religion, which is religion’s perennial temptation to take heaven by storm, to imagine itself above mere creaturehood, and to award itself the place of ultimacy.

And this critical perspective, this distancing ourselves from true-believing religion, is not only the condition without which there can be no significant interfaith dialogue, it is the condition without which the peace of the world from now on will never be sustained. Certainly we must meet one another, in this great new parliament of global religions, as persons of faith; but faith is not synonymous with religion. Probably faith never will be found apart from religion, some religion; but the biblically and theologically informed Christian will nevertheless be able to distinguish between what comes of faith and what comes of religion. And the greatest distinction of all, in this contrast, lies in the readiness of faith, unlike religion, to confess its incompleteness and insufficiency. By definition, faith is a deficiency, a lack, a not seeing (1 Corinthians 13:12), a longing that is made even more poignant by the fact that it is—tentatively, expectantly—in touch with the Ultimate. Authentic faith can never rest content with itself; it can never extinguish its own existential antithesis, doubt; it can never feel that it has arrived at its destination—that now it sees face to face and no longer “through a glass darkly.”

Listen to the way faith speaks, in a statement by one of the great Christian activists and lay theologians of our epoch, a French Protestant who was part of the Resistance, and who was so committed to the possibility of the reign of God that he did not stop with resistance but became the mayor of Bordeaux, thus demonstrating the Reformation insistence that true faith begets (as well as modesty) the courage to work for change. His name was Jacques Ellul, and this is how he described faith:

Faith is a terribly caustic substance, a burning acid. It puts to the test every element of my life and society; it spares nothing. It leads me ineluctably to question my certitudes, all my moralities, beliefs and policies. It forbids me to attach ultimate significance to any expression of human activity. It detaches and delivers me from money and the family, from my job and my knowledge. It‘s the surest road to realizing that ‘the only thing I know is that I don’t know anything.’13

Such faith, and not religion, is the prerequisite for dialogue between the religions today; and such dialogue is the prerequisite for civilization’s survival.

Culture-Religion and Prophetic Faith

This distinction between faith and religion, which (as I’ve noted) was one of the most important insights of the neo-orthodox school, always prevents me from saying straightforwardly, as people do in ordinary discourse, that Christianity is a religion. In its essence, at its kerygmatic heart—that is, as gospel—it is not. As Barth, Tillich, Bonhoeffer, and many others have insisted, Jesus did not come to add yet another religion to the world’s already exhaustive and exhausting religious agenda!

But of course in its historical pilgrimage Christianity has been, is universally described as being, and still even thinks of itself as . . . a religion: a religion that may be compared with other religions; a religion that itself bears all the earmarks of the religions grasping that the Bible and the most faithful theology call in question. As I have already suggested, it is in fact doubtful that one could find any instance or exemplification of Christianity, now or in the past, that did not combine in subtle and confusing ways Pentecost and Babel, faith and religion; and in all likelihood most of what has been called Christianity and continues to be designated such has more of Babel than of Pentecost in it! All the same, it is necessary for serious Christians to keep the distinction between faith and religion always in mind, and to apply it in very concrete and practical ways in the daily life of the church. Empirically speaking, Christianity may never be found apart from a combination of these two antithetical movements of the human spirit—grasping and being grasped, reaching after the absolute and being encountered by the unreachable absolute. But the Christian community that has lost the capacity intellectually and spiritually to distinguish the two at the level of thought and language will be a community in danger of losing its soul.

An important way in which theological scholars during the past century have tried to preserve this distinction is by contrasting two types of religion: culture-religion and prophetic religion. If we are to use the term religion at all to describe Christianity, I believe that something like that type of contrast must be maintained. It may be too daring—and for many too confusing—to say straightforwardly that Christianity is not a religion. But at least contemporary Christians should try to comprehend what it means when theologians insist that at its revelatory core, Christianity is not and ought not to be practiced as a ‘culture-religion.’

The term culture-religion came into prominence in North America in the 1960s, though its antecedents—particularly in German theologies—are much earlier. The term has a particular usefulness in our New World setting, where (as I claimed at the beginning of this chapter) there is a continuing tendency to merge ‘Christ and Culture’ (to use the well-known categories of H. Richard Niebuhr).14

Christianity in the United States and Canada was never established legally, as it was in the European motherlands, though attempts at legal establishment were made here too; but, instead, what occurred on this continent—more as a matter of habit and association than as anything planned—was the gradual but effective identification of our culture or way of life with the Christian faith. We learned to consider ourselves Christian societies and Christian nations, and to equate Christianity more or less with what we have built here—our way of governing ourselves, our moral codes, our values.

For reasons that many of us are still trying to decipher, this tendency to equate religion and culture was always more prevalent in US-American experience than in the northern country of the continent, Canada. There has always been, I think, a stubborn streak of skepticism in the Canadian spirit, as there is in the spirit of most northern peoples (the Scandinavians and the Scots, for example): it’s hard to believe in God and all that when it’s so cold, and you’re living on a rock like the Canadian (Precambrian) Shield! The United States inherited not only a more hospitable terrain but a much heavier dose of Modern optimism, and its Christianity evolved accordingly. I think what surprises many Canadians and Europeans about church life in the United States (sometimes it charms them, sometimes they just find it excessive) is the combination of rather simplistic theology and rather stringent morality with enthusiastic and exaggerated displays of happiness, or what passes for happiness. There is a celebratory ring in most worship in US-American settings that neither Canadians nor Europeans can duplicate. When we try to do so, the results are usually quite laughable. The celebratory spirit of US religion cannot be imitated in other social contexts because its secret is its combination of religious piety and cultural complacency. It is a celebration of the culture, including its economic success and political preeminence, at least as much as it is a celebration of the religion that contributed so much to the shaping of the culture.

Peter L. Berger, whose book The Noise of Solemn Assemblies was a kind of milestone in the Anglo-Saxon deployment of the term culture-religion, explained this type of equation in the following way:

American society possesses a cultural religion that is vaguely derived from the Judaeo-Christian tradition and that contains values generally held by most Americans. The cultural religion gives solemn ratification to these values. The cultural religion is politically established on all levels of government, receiving from the state both moral and economic support. The religious denominations, whatever else they may believe or practice, are carriers of this cultural religion. Affiliation with a religious denomination thus becomes ipso facto an act of allegiance to the common political creed. Disaffiliation, in turn, renders an individual not only religiously but also politically suspect.15

Why is such an identification of Christianity and culture theologically problematic? What price does the Christian movement pay for this kind of proximity to the dominant culture? As a way into my answer to that question, I want to quote a sentence of Reinhold Niebuhr—it is in fact the very first sentence of Niebuhr’s 1935 book, An Interpretation of Christian Ethics: “Protestant Christianity in America,” it runs, “is, unfortunately, unduly dependent upon the very culture of modernity, the disintegration of which would offer a more independent religion a unique opportunity.”16

In this one sentence, Niebuhr puts his finger precisely on the consequences of practicing Christianity as a culture-religion. By allowing itself to be absorbed by the evolving culture, the Christian faith loses its potentiality for being responsible in and to and for that culture—for being, in biblical terms, salt, yeast, and light in its social context. It forfeits this prophetic calling for the sake of the shallow kind of acceptance and popularity and quantitative success that it may acquire through its accommodation of itself to the governing spirit of its host society. It has little or nothing beyond rhetoric to bring to that society distinguishable from the society’s existing assumptions and experiences; and this is particularly conspicuous and unfortunate when, in situations of social crisis, the society needs precisely some light from beyond its own resources—needs to hear, precisely, a voice that does not simply echo its own tired and failed ambitions, its Babel confusion. The ending of modernity, of which (in this perceptive sentence) Reinhold Niebuhr spoke decades before anyone heard the word postmodern—the end and crisis of modernity creates for prophetic faith an “opportunity” that faith communities rarely have when societies are in their heyday: an opportunity (one must say in Niebuhr’s behalf), not to enhance their membership roles and social standing, but to speak truthfully, to act out of genuine hope and not just social optimism, to enhance and preserve the life—the life not of the church but of the world to which the church is sent. Because most Protestantism in America had given itself so unconditionally to the modern vision, Niebuhr believed, it was not in a position to offer any alternative vision at the point when modernity began to show how shallow, deceptive, and dangerous a vision it was.

Stating the point in other language, culture-religion lacks the necessary distance from its host society to be truly responsible in and for that society. It is so much of its world that it has nothing distinctive to bring to its world, only more of the same—undoubtedly in stained-glass accents. In the end, while it may perform a certain pastoral and ritual function among people, Christianity as culture-religion serves more conspicuously those powers that have their own self-enhancing designs upon society: powers that benefit from the status quo and are therefore very glad to support a religion that helps to maintain the status quo.

Now, while culture-religion has a particular application to Christianity in America, it is by no means a new phenomenon. It is just a modern version of the very ancient idea and reality of religious establishment. It is an adaptation of this idea undertaken in more or less democratic societies where decisions about religion cannot be ordered from the top down, as was the case in Europe from Constantine onwards. It describes the kind of establishment that was worked out in this New World setting, a setting that positively rejected and despised the Old World versions of Christian establishment (since most of our pioneer forebears were fleeing precisely from those legal establishments of old Europe), but a setting that at the same time was not ready to entertain the idea of religious disestablishment. With some important exceptions, we seem incapable of entertaining the thought of Christian disestablishment to this very day. The concept of the separation of church and state is perhaps a polite bow in that direction, but it is also very deceptive, because the establishment we fashioned on this continent was never a de jure (legal or formal) one such as an agreement with the state would usually be, but a de facto informal relationship with the culture at large. Maintaining the separation of church and state (which itself often proves to be more rhetorical than real) does little to affect a distinction between Christianity and culture. That distinction can only be maintained at the level of the church’s theology, preaching, and public witness.

Why are we so steadfastly committed to the idea of Christian establishment? Our forebears said no to legal establishment, and we can be glad of that; but why should Christians seek establishment of any kind? Is there anything in the Christian gospel that would lead us in that direction? To the contrary, as Kierkegaard insisted, is there not in the gospel of the cross that which would deny Christians such a comfortable relationship with the world? Yet despite the biblical warnings against it, the notion that Christianity is quite naturally and properly a religion bound to seek some form of establishment—including some special relationship with the policy-making classes and governing institutions, but more important (in democratic societies) the achievement of majority status and people power—this notion is such a hoary one, itself so entrenched in church history and popular Christian imagination that it is terribly hard to displace or even to critique it. After all, it has been around for at least fifteen or sixteen centuries, by far the greater share of Christian history. It is assumed—most Christians in the United States (and many in Canada), I suspect, simply assume—that the very mission of the church is to achieve establishment in some form or other, if only by being able to claim greater numbers than other power groupings; it is also assumed that churches and Christians who do not manifest that aim, or who may even be very critical of it, are simply failing as missional communities. Again and again the great commission of Matthew’s gospel17 is cited to lend biblical weight to the belief that Christianity is positively intended for majority status, that is, for establishment, ergo that something has gone radically wrong when churches experience quantitative losses or an apparent loss of popular support.

Within the past few decades, however, and particularly in the aftermath of the brief and rather disillusioning run on the mainline churches that occurred in the 1950s, more and more people within the once most established churches in North America and elsewhere began to notice some of the flaws of establishment religion. Today significant minorities in all the American and Canadian old-line denominations not only question the role of Christianity as a culture-religion but have sufficiently distanced themselves from the dominant culture so that they are frequently accused by self-declared conservative Christians of betraying both Christianity and their nation. Perhaps the most astonishing aspect of contemporary life in North America is that so many Christians in denominations that were until about 1960 the most culturally established of all have given various kinds of indication that they believe Christianity is fundamentally at loggerheads with our way of life. The nearly unanimous protest against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the part of the once-mainline churches of the United States and Canada is only one indicator of this new situation. I myself have lived long enough to observe my own denomination, the United Church of Canada, morph from being, certainly, the most culturally established Protestant church in Canada to achieving a countrywide reputation for radicalism and conspicuous divergence from the historical norms and counsels of conventional religion in our country. Even persons in these old denominations who lament the passing of social prestige and respectability have, most of them, been caused to wonder whether Christianity may not be—in its essence—something quite different from what it has usually been. As Sallie McFague writes, “Wiggle as we will, most of us North American comfortable mainline Christians know there is probably something wrong with a Christian faith that does not involve a countercultural stance.”18

Perhaps just at this point, however, a parenthesis is required; for the mention of countercultural approaches to Christian faith and mission introduces another question, which critics of the Christian Left do not fail to belabor: Is there not a danger in some ecclesiastical circles that the Christian religion will be uncritically allied with certain countercultural ideologies, identities, and causes? Is it not possible for Christians who are critical of the dominant culture to pursue uncritical identity with counter- or alternative cultures, and is this tendency perhaps just as questionable from the perspective of prophetic faith as the older approach? When the church leaps from association with the establishment to greater solidarity with anti-establishment forces and factions, is it not in danger of seeking legitimization through association with the protesting minority, and thus of manifesting once again the same old lack of courage to stand alone—by faith alone?

It would be wrong, I think, to dismiss this critique out of hand. Sometimes what we may call the habit of establishment manifests itself in quests for proximity to protesting minorities on the part of Christians who are disillusioned with the cultural majority. It is no solution of the dangers of establishment when Christians move from an unexamined conventional identification with established power to an easy endorsement of movements of protest against that power. It may be quite justifiable when the Christian protest aligns itself with other forms of social protest; but it remains true that Christians must always try to be quite clear about their own inherent reasons for protest. That is to say, theological reflection is always required of the church. It is not enough to assume that every cause that announces its espousal of justice, peace, and the integrity of creation can without further ado be embraced by Christians.

One must speak of this openly, for there is a certain danger among ultraliberal or self-consciously radical elements in the once mainline churches that countercultural solidarity with this or that social protest will be thought natural, right, and good without any further theological reflection. The fact of protesting seems in these circles to justify the stance. There is a tendency here, not unconnected with the thrill of protest in itself, to seek Christian authentication through endorsement by popular countercultural causes and identities. As Christians, we have our own reasons for being ecologically, racially, sexually, aesthetically, and in other ways vigilant and involved in today’s changing social scene. We do not have to borrow from others a rationale for environmental stewardship or for concern over marginalized groups or for international economic justice or for world peace. We have an ancient, profound, tried-and-true tradition of ontological and ethical wisdom upon which to draw; and wherever Christian groups have drawn upon that wisdom faithfully and with imagination, they have not only brought an independent voice to the chorus of those who struggle for greater humanity in the earth; they have been welcomed by others because they could contribute insight and perspective often lacking in other protesting groups. We need not be ashamed of the tradition that makes our prophetic protest possible. We need not turn elsewhere to find authentication.

Having introduced this topic parenthetically, however, I certainly do not want to overemphasize the need to maintain a little critical distance in our relationships with countercultural elements in our present society. One of the most hopeful aspects of today’s chaotic world is that as Christians we may quite legitimately make common cause with so many others who are concerned for the future of the planet and human civilization. Ours is a time of experimentation: old relationships are perhaps no longer reliable; new relationships may be possible and productive. George A. Lindbeck has named this period in the history of Christianity an “awkward intermediate stage”: we are moving (he says) from a position of “having once been culturally established” to one in which we are “not yet clearly disestablished.”19 In this interim it is, I think, inevitable that the most serious Christians and Christian groupings will experiment with all kinds of new arrangements and alliances. Some of these will prove unhelpful or wrong, and some will be or become important—will prove a way into the future. I think we should try to see in all such experiments, as in the mostly unorganized dissatisfaction with the so-called Christian cultural establishment that is their background, a certain continuity with what has been best in Christianity throughout the ages, and was of the very essence of the Protestant Reformation. “The most important contribution of Protestantism to the world in the past, present and future,” wrote Tillich in 1948, “is the principle of prophetic protest against every power which claims divine character for itself—whether it be church or state, party or leader.” And we could echo, with emphasis, Tillich’s next sentence: “this prophetic, Protestant protest is more necessary today than at any time since the period of the Reformation.”20